Okay, so this is entirely new to me. Sparrow is was an email client for Mac OS X and iOS (and Windows), which brought a decent Gmail experience to these platforms - as opposed to Apple's own not-so-good Gmail support and Google's Gmail iOS application which, well, is just a webpage. Google has now acquired Sparrow, and basically all hell has broken loose, to the point of Rian van der Merwe writing that 'we' lost "faith in a philosophy that we thought was a sustainable way to ensure a healthy future for independent software development, where most innovation happens".

The original developers aren't around, everyone makes the assumption because it is open source, it is easily supported.

Except nobody is saying that support is guaranteed. What is said is that the possibility of support is there. The chance that there is support depends on developer interest and user interest. I daresay that in this particular case, Sparrow would have no problem finding new contributors.

Except nobody is saying that support is guaranteed. What is said is that the possibility of support is there. The chance that there is support depends on developer interest and user interest. I daresay that in this particular case, Sparrow would have no problem finding new contributors.

Right, and so, even if the source code is not available, how is that preventing you or anyone else from recreating the app? It will just take a little longer.

Sparrow was built by a small team in a relatively short time. If the market really exists, then someone else can do it again. They don't even have to be very creative, they can just copy what Sparrow did. And Google's not going to sue them, especially if it is an Open Source clone of Sparrow.

True, there is nothing preventing anybody from creating a clone. Having the source however, would reduce the barriers to entry and reduce any losses in the community whilst the clone is being created. By the time the clone has reached the level of the clonee then it is probably too late...